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Sheep's Tails and Kidneys
Blanch, trim, and stew the tails, as before, in as much stock as will cover them, and stew with them a carrot, an onion stuck with two cloves, and a small bunch of sweet herbs. When the tails are done enough, take them up, and place them in a circle on a hot dish; put in the centre an equal number of broiled kidneys, and serve in a tureen a sauce prepared as follows. Strain the gravy in which the tails were stewed, thicken with flour and butter, boil it till it is thick enough to coat the spoon, and stir into it the juice of half a lemon. Time, three or four hours to stew the tails.
A Victorian dish of two cheap offal cuts plated together, the tails braised long and slow, the kidneys grilled at the last minute. Most of the work is sourcing; the cooking is straightforward.
- "As before" — the blanching"As before" refers back to an earlier entry in the book. Blanching of this kind normally means covering the trimmed tails with cold water, bringing them to the boil, draining and rinsing off the grey scum, which helps keep the braising liquid clear enough to make a sauce from.
- Sheep's tailsThese are lambs' tails, traditionally removed at docking in spring. They are almost never on general sale now; a butcher who breaks down whole lambs may get them to order. Oxtail behaves similarly in the pot but is a different, meatier thing.
- Three to four hours is not a misprintTails are collagen, bone and fat with very little muscle. They need long, barely-trembling heat to become tender and to give the stock body. Keep the liquid at a bare simmer; a rolling boil shreds the meat off the bone and clouds the gravy.
- Kidneys are the oppositeLambs' kidneys want two to four minutes a side under a hot grill, halved lengthways, core snipped out, cut side up first. Cooked past pink they turn grainy and ammoniac. Broil them only when the tails are already plated.
- "Thicken with flour and butter"Equal weights of soft butter and plain flour worked to a paste — beurre manié — whisked into the strained, simmering gravy in small pieces. Roughly 1 oz of each per pint of liquid gives the coating consistency described. Let it boil a couple of minutes to cook out the raw flour.
- AromaticsThe onion stuck with cloves and the "small bunch of sweet herbs" are a standard Victorian bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string. All of it is strained out before the sauce is thickened.
- StockThe book assumes a household stockpot. A light beef or lamb stock works; unsalted is important, since three or four hours of reduction will concentrate whatever salt is in it. Season the sauce at the end, after the lemon juice.
- YieldThe recipe calls for an equal number of kidneys and tails. The dish is built as a ring of tails with the kidneys heaped in the middle, sauce handed separately in a tureen rather than poured over.
Cassell's belongs to a period when a serious cookery book was expected to find a use for every part of the animal, and the tail — a cut with almost no saleable meat on it — was exactly the sort of thing a good kitchen was judged on. Lambs' tails came in a short spring glut from docking, and recipes for them appear in nineteenth-century books alongside pluck, chitterlings and lamb's fry, and largely vanish from twentieth-century ones as such things stopped reaching domestic cooks. The construction here — a braise ringed on the dish with a grilled garnish at the centre and the reduced cooking liquor thickened and sent round separately — is standard Anglo-French service of the day, and the finishing squeeze of lemon is doing the same job it does in a modern pan sauce, cutting the fat that a long stew of tails inevitably renders out.